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Drupal – the open source content management solution that powers roughly 1% of all the sites on the internet has just gone live with its new major release Drupal 7. We just did a test run of the site. Here are some of the things that we noticed:

Drupal 7 Installation

The installation was a breeze and is comparable to the famous WordPress Installation now. We had no issues with the installation and everything looked great.

Drupal 7 Admin Panel

The admin panel is very easy to navigate and is clear on how to add content (as a page or an article) on the website. The rest of the page is also very well structured. You can set up blocks from directly within Drupal which gives you more flexibility on how you want your site to look.

Drupal 7 Themes

Adding and activating themes was very easy. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of settings to change on the themes currently but with time it should improve. For our example site, we have used the Danland Theme pictured below.

Example Drupal 7 Website

We have set up an example Drupal 7 website so that you can play around with the front end.

WordPress or No WordPress

We are now building the CMS platform for Zuccala Homes. Initially we were going to go with WordPress but turns out that WordPress is not very suitable because it cannot handle the tables and relationships of the database properly. That said however, we are doing another project where WordPress is the perfect solution for the CMS.

Custom CMS Build for Zuccala Homes

As such we built a custom CMS fro Zuccala Homes.This allows them to upload images, upload brochures, connect house designs to their house and land packages. We have also built all the image templates in Photoshop which they can now use to build promotions etc. themselves. The image is a very draft stage of the CMS which is being finalised right now.

Cutting Costs

We are setting up the CMS in a way that allows Zuccala Homes to make changes to most parts of the website so that they can cut down on maintenance costs of the website and use that budget on marketing to drive more visitors to the websites.

Previously using dzineCMS you had to resize your images on a different software before dropping into the site. For some clients who didn’t have a lot of technical knowledge around image editing, it was a bit of a pain 🙂

Now with time, we have decided to make it easier for those clients and enable optimization and resizing feature in the image gallery. You can now use the CMS itself to resize your photos that you have imported from your camera and make them web-ready.

If you are using DzineCMS to make changes to the SEO and Content of your sites, here are some instructions on how to resize images using DzineCMS itself.

Log into the dzineCMS system

Upload an image to the image library or select an existing image

Hover your mouse over the image and click on optimise

This will load up an optimization screen. you can use this screen to make the following changes to your images:

If you have any issues with resizing images or would like one of our staff to take you through how it is done, please drop us a line at info@dzineclub.com

Do you currently have a website but no content editing capabilities?

DzineCMS can be a low cost but effective solution that can allow you to make changes to your text, images and SEO content. Contact us at info@dzineclub.com for a demo and to find out how you can implement it for your website.

What is a CMS?

A CMS is a content Management System. A CMS allows you to manage your digital content. In terms of websites, a CMS will allow you to manage all your pages, images and documents that form part of your website.

Small And Medium Websites

Small and Medium websites are usually built using static pages. The pages use HTML, Javascript, Flash files etc. The pages are stored on a web server. Usually making changes to HTML requires special knowledge and/or software. A Client is usually not able to go and make a quick change to a spelling mistake, image or add a new product or service easily. Usually the process is to ask your web-developer to make the change and this can be very time consuming and at some cases expensive.

The low-cost solution – A Content Managed Solution

The low-cost solution is to plug in a content management solution on to your site. In a CMS system, you will be able to log in yourself and make changes as you would do to a Word Document. The CMS also allows you to store all your images as assets, so that you can re-use them over time and also allows you to index all your documents, so that you can drop them into the website whenever you please.

This way, you will be able to efficiently cut down on turn around times and costs and make changes to your site quickly.

What features should a decent Content Managed Solution Have?

Depending on your needs and your budget here are some basic functionality any CMS systems should provide

What you Need

Change Text on your page, add new text and delete existing text on a page

Change images on your page, add new images and delete existing images

What you should want based on your needs

Store all your images in a library so that you can pick and drop them in as you choose. This means that you don’t have to upload your images to the site everytime you want to change them

Store all your documents (PDFs) in a library, so that your brochures, product whitepapers can be dropped into the website as you please without having a local copy

Allow you to make changes to the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) content of your page so that you can get better visibility on Google

Allow you to add new pages to your site, these new pages already have your branding and a link is automatically created for you

Search Functionality so that users can now search for things on your site

A Backup functionality so that if you mess something up, you can revert back to the original

The power in your hands and advantages

You can now update your pages quickly and efficiently and have more control

You keep the costs of changing smaller things on site low

Your site is more flexible in generating new content

You have a library of images and documents that works as a backup and also allows you to drop content on your site quickly

With great power comes great responsibility

There are also some pitfalls on having the power in your hands. Here are some of the things you have to understand

Once you make a change and publish the page, it is live for everyone to see. So if you make a spelling mistake it will be on the site. So you have to make sure you have a good approval process

You should stick to the colours and branding of your site. Sometimes we see clients putting all sorts of colours and sizes to make the page look more appealing. This can more often than not make the site look less professional. Unless that is your branding, then it’s fine.

The DzineClub Content Management System:

We also provide varying levels of CMS and customisations to our clients. Drop us a line if you are interested.